Public opinion, insofar as it has as yet been plumbed, seems favorable -- and it ought to be said at this point that it will require hard work, zealous team-work, and generous financial support if the venture is to succeed. In a word, it behooves all concerned -- organizations and individual citizens alike -- to get a realistic perspective of the size of the financial problem involved. For it is self-evident that unless the Festival and associated enterprises are on a scale that will attract patronage from far and near, it cannot achieve the exalted goal which Mr. Patterson has in mind.

Editorial,
The Beacon-Herald,
January 1952

Let us establish this Shakespeare theatre and festival by all means (and entirely at our expense)
-- but let's have it in Toronto. Toronto people, I understand, have been mad about the project from the start. They'd be broken-hearted, I fear, if we did not go through with it. (Of course, it would be noskin off their pretty noses if we went flat on ours.) ... Well then, set up this theatre in Toronto. You couldn't expect those Toronto fans to come up here for the performances any more than for the parties. We'd have to pay the fare for enthusiasts from the United States, too, of course, for the same reason. Stratford people could pay their own way down -- we're the ones that hatched this thing, anyway, because every one of us has been itching for years to revive the real Shakespeare, and it's only right that we should pay, and pay plenty. Another nice thing about having it in Toronto would be that the audience would have all of Lake Ontario to flop into after sitting out a Shakespeare play in a tent in one of our Summers.

Letter to the editor,
The Beacon-Herald,
July 1952

These two excerpts from the Stratford, Ontario, newspaper in 1952 -- the former, from when the Festival was barely a glimmer in the eyes of the Stratford City Council; the latter, from the week that Tyrone Guthrie first visited Canada -- capture the two prevailing views of the time. The astonishing fact that the Stratford Festival had its opening night on July 13, 1953, almost one year to the day after Tony Guthrie first set foot in our small town,
suggests that the sympathetic editorial was far more indicative of the eventual attitudes of Canadians -- and men and women around the world -- than the sarcastic letter to the editor.

What sort of men and women would provide that "hard work, zealous team-work, and generous financial support" which The Beacon-Herald correctly identified as the necessary
ingredients for an internationally respected Festival? The answer was not clearly apparent in 1952. As a writer in the Toronto Telegram noted at the time, Stratford-upon-Avon,
England, may have been synonymous with Shakespeare, but Stratford, Ontario, was synonymous with hockey. In our namesake in the Old Country, boards were trod upon
by performers; in Canada's Stratford, they were something to be knocked into. It seemed
as if there was a Stratford native on every team of the National Hockey League: George
Armstrong, Joflre Desilets, Ray Getliffe, Joe Klukay, Al Murray. Older hockey fans could
rattle off an earlier generation: Dolly Dolson, George Hay, Wally Hearn, Harold Hicks,
Toots Holway, and, of course, the renowned "Stratford Streak," Howie Morenz.

To go from a town that hollered hockey to one that shouted Shakespeare was not an easy feat, but there have been many clues to the remarkable nature of Stratford's citizens over
the past century and a half.

After the war of 1812, the British government granted a million acres of land along Lake Huron to the Canada Company, which was headed by a Scottish businessman (and poet), John Gait. We call such men pioneers, but in truth they were developers. They took what was called Huron Tract, and, according to the conditions of the agreement with England, they had to build an inn and a church, roughly every fourteen miles. (This distance was approximately one day's walk through the bush.) Indeed, if you travel from Guelph to Goderich today, you encounter another town around fourteen miles after the last.

While hacking a road to Lake Huron, the surveyors came to a marshy creek surrounded
by a thick forest, named it Little Thames, and noted what they described as "a good mill-
site." Gait's less-renowned replacement, Thomas Mercer Jones, named the area Stratford,
which means, purportedly, a narrow crossing. The year was 1832, exactly 150 years
before the concept of a Stratford Festival truly took hold.

In one of those name-dropping, prosaic books of the turn of the century (History of
the County of Perth From 1825 to 1902 by William Johnston), one can read of the
extremely inauspicious beginnings of the town: "In all new commercial centres material
progress at the outset is accelerated or retarded by their environment having a natural
adaptability for agricultural purposes. There was no town in Perth Country, nor, indeed, in
the Huron Tract, located in a spot so destitute in its surroundings of those elements which
give life to a backwoods hamlet."